“A day at a time,” he said solemnly. “I’m going to shower and see you later. You find something in that freezer to thaw for us.”
“Sure will.” She watched him get up and leave the room. He was naked, handsome, all muscle. He had scars, but she barely noticed them. Desire stirred and she wondered if there was any hope for them to have a future together. Was the sex between them blinding them to the problems they faced—or was it helping to work those problems out?
Sex for them had always been good, but they couldn’t stay married on that alone, and they really hadn’t solved any problems between them. Or had they? There was her discovery that Tom thought she wished he had died instead of Ryan. They’d been able to clear the air about that. And she realized how tense and uptight she had been about getting pregnant, and how that might have driven him away from her. So maybe they were making progress.
After she showered and dressed, she walked through the house, closing off some rooms because she wanted to avoid seeing them.
As she set a casserole out to thaw, she received a call and didn’t recognize the number, but then she saw the name Jason Nash on the caller ID and her breath caught.
She answered the call and heard a lilting female voice. “May I please speak to Emily Knox?”
“This is Emily Knox,” Emily answered, barely able to catch her breath and feeling as if her heart was being squeezed by a giant fist. She gulped air, trying to calm.
“Mrs. Knox, this is Becky Nash. I’m Polly’s mother. I’m sure you remember us.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, instantly recalling the discussion with the doctor who’d first told them about the Nash family after the bus accident. “How is Polly?” Emily asked, holding her breath and wondering why she was receiving this call.
“Polly is fine,” Becky Nash said. “We’ll be passing through Texas, and we thought we could stop by if you would like to meet our daughter.”
For a moment Emily couldn’t answer. Tears filled her eyes and she felt a mixture of emotions—dread at revisiting all the pain from those days when Ryan was in the hospital, but also a thrill to get to meet the little girl who had received Ryan’s heart. Their Ryan had given part of himself to another child who would have lost her life. Now their Ryan’s heart kept Polly Nash alive.
“We’d love to meet her, Mrs. Nash.”
“Please, call me Becky. We can come by your house if you’d like. Royal isn’t too far from where we’ll be on the interstate. I know this is rather short notice, but we changed some plans and now we’ll be driving where we can stop by next Tuesday if that is convenient. Would Tuesday afternoon be possible?”
“Yes, that would be perfect. We’re at Knox Acres Ranch, just outside town. I can tell you how to get here.”
They finished making the arrangements and ended the call. Emily remembered the young mother—a pretty blue-eyed blonde in her early twenties. Jason Nash, her tall brown-haired husband, was an accountant with a big company in Denver. One of the doctors had approached them about the transplant, and later, after they agreed, they met the parents. But Emily and Tom had never met Polly. Now that was going to change on Tuesday afternoon.
She started to call Tom to tell him, but she decided she’d rather tell him in person. And she was curious about the guesthouse. She hadn’t been inside since he’d moved there after their separation. She didn’t know if he had changed it, spreading out and making a new home for himself. Or maybe he’d just left it the way it was.
She basked in the sunshine as she made the short walk across the yard and wide driveway. The guesthouse was a much smaller, far simpler house than the mansion, with a friendly warmth to it that she’d never felt the large house had. When she arrived, she crossed the porch to the open door. The screen door was closed, so she knocked on that.
“Come in,” Tom called.
She stepped inside. “Where are you?” She looked around the living room that looked exactly like it always had after visitors had come and gone. The front room was immaculate and did not appear lived in.
“I’m in my office.”
She had no idea where he had made an office, but she followed the sound of his voice and then saw him in the big master bedroom. He was on a ladder in the closet rummaging around on a shelf. Boxes and papers were strewn at his feet.
“I’m glad to see signs of someone living in here since you’ve been doing so for the past year. But you don’t have much in the way of excess anything.”
“I don’t need much.”
“Can you come down from there? I want to talk to you.”
He paused and looked at her, and then came down a step and jumped the rest of the way.
He frowned as he faced her. “This must be something serious.”
“It is. I need to talk to you.”
He held out his hand. “Let’s go in the living room and we can sit.”
“I don’t know that we need to sit to talk,” she said, walking back into the front room and turning to face him. “I got a phone call. And I’m worried this might bring up some painful memories for us.”
“Who called? This sounds important,” he said.